Less than a month after the announcement of the Army’s “Right to Integrate” Hackathon Sprint, soldiers down range are already benefiting from more integrated systems.
The initiative, also known as Project Jailbreak, which Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is overseeing alongside several defense contractors, is designed to fully integrate systems and weapons manufactured by different defense companies that had previously been siloed and were unable to fully share data or communicate seamlessly. Historically, systems would often not be able to integrate with those made by different companies.
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The first couple of systems that were jailbroken to make them more integrated were the Army’s command and control platforms, and those have already been pushed to troops in the Middle East, according to Dr. Alex Miller, the Army’s chief technology officer, during an event at Fort Carson, Colorado, on Thursday.
Also jailbroke were “our C-2 platform and the ability to actually tie in a lot of the counter[-drone], the counter-unmanned system, radars, cameras, and effectors,” Miller said.
Driscoll said the Army is “failing” if the service cannot push many of these integration efforts to troops within 30 days, particularly those in the Middle East, due to the risks they face amid the fragile ceasefire with Iran. Six U.S. service members were killed in an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait in the early hours of the war, and several troops injured in the attack have said they were not adequately prepared for such attacks.
More than 50 companies complied with the initiative and jailbroke their equipment, including Anduril, Boeing, General Dynamics, L3Harris, Leidos, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Palantir, Perennial Autonomy, and RTX.
Miller compared the problem they’re trying to rectify to household appliances and said the previous way of doing things was as if each item required a unique adaptor to plug into an electrical socket.
“If you think about your daily life, think about every accessory you have — light bulbs, toasters, TVs — imagine if every single one of those had a different way to connect, you couldn’t just find the light bulb and plug it in,” Miller told reporters. “We actually had to go find a light bulb and then a special cord to plug that into the wall. Your toaster didn’t just plug into the outlet, you had to go find a special adaptor. That is the condition that we had created over time.”
The impetus for the mission, Driscoll said, or his “a-ha moment,” occurred when he met with the Ukrainians in Germany. The Ukrainian troops invited to come out and train with U.S. forces showed the secretary their modular open system architecture command, or MOSA, and he realized the U.S. systems were “just not as integrated and not as simple and not as effective for the warfighter.
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“When I walked out with General Donahue from looking at their systems and finishing having them explain it to me, saying, ‘Oh my god, we have to move right now,” Driscoll said, referencing General Christopher Donahue, commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa.
“We’ve continued to interact with our allies and our partners around the world, like Ukraine, we realized we had to go back to our old systems, and we had [to] jailbreak them, we had to open them, that so that they could hit that same level of compatibility, and so that’s Operation Jailbreak,” Driscoll added.
Shortly after that experience, Driscoll dispatched his team to reach out to industry partners, hoping that they would agree to jailbreak their systems to expand integration to help U.S. troops. He said, “100% of them leaned in in a way that I would have never expected.”
